What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

I've given in and pledged to the Dungeon Crawl Classics kickstarter. Ends tonight if you guys want in.

We recently ended the first season of Battlestar Not Galactica. Throughout the season, there have been a lot of space battles, with a dash of sabotage. There weren’t many of them, but when they did occur they were ruinous. The fleet lost one of their older frigates after being fired upon by the Orthrus, which was caused by a Cylon virus infecting the battlestar’s fire control and labeling the gunner as a traitor for a time.

The season finale occurred with a backdrop of Colonial Day. During the revelry, a saboteur, who turned out to be a Cylon sleeper agent, planted explosives on several shuttles and the battlestar itself. The commander and the chief medical officer finally express their feelings towards one another. The XO, haunted by the image of his dead wife, sought solace in the arms of the communications officer. The gunner who accidentally scuttled the frigate has his dance with the Sagittaron representative interrupted by the frigate’s captain, which the gunner browbeats into submission and is further backed up by the MPs.

Explosions rock the fleet. Very few of the ships in the fleet are untouched. The CAG nearly dies, but takes command of the luxury liner during the time of crisis. The chief medical officer is mortally wounded in an explosion on the Orthrus. Some of the Viper pilots catch on that a particular marine is actually the saboteur and give an abortive chase. It ends when the marine is cornered and killed before he had a chance to set explosives in Engineering.

The fleet is in mourning, the commander especially so. Repairs to the fleet are initiated and burials are performed.

However, back at the Colonies, a body wakes up in a resurrection pool; disoriented and scared. It’s the chief medical officer. She is greeted by another Cylon, a model that was murdered on the luxury liner several months ago during Quorum elections.

The new season gives background information between the medical officer and the murdered Cylon, the reason why the war started, and the fact that they are not allowed to mingle the general Cylon population. Meanwhile, on the other side of Colonial space, the fleet is getting hammered by the Cylons. The fleet is getting attacked more and more often, which leads to the commander’s decision to head to the Armistice Line and to cut across Cylon space. This plan is deemed ludicrous by the President, who disallows it. However, the commander disobeys.

The fleet jumps to the Gibraltar Strait, only to find it mined. Luckily, one of the frigates recently put back into service is a minesweeper. They barely have enough time to clear the mines before a flight of Heavy Raiders appear and attack. The fleet jumps to the Line.

In order to give a chance for the FTLs to recharge, the fleet crosses the Line under sublight. Several hours in, they make contact with a basestar. The alarm is raised, but then is halted when it is apparent that the enemy vessel is seemingly inoperable. A visual recon by Vipers reveals that the basestar is from the First Cylon War and that it has taken a severe beating.

With information little to come by, the commander orders an away team to investigate the basestar. Once inside, they discover the place in a shambles, with Centurions going about trying to fix their fatally damaged ship. A few grenades thrown into the conn eliminate the Centurions there and the squad makes their way to the Throne Room to try to get astrogation information. There, they find Ahriman, a brain damaged IL series Cylon who greets the humans warmly after seeing what appears to him a humanoid Cylon within their midst. The players go with the misidentification to extract information from the Cylon. However, they didn’t get much since the session had to end prematurely.

Maybe one day I’ll get off my ass and type up the sessions on my Obsidian Portal.

I've been bitten by the RPG bug. I've wanted to seriously get into rpgs ever since seeing the "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" episode of Community. I've played some rpgs since then like Palladium, Pathfinder, and one of the Star Wars games. It was always fun but never as consistent as I would have liked. Well my wife and I have since gotten the 3 main source books for D&D 5th as well as the beginner's box. I'm dming the adventure from the started box while my wife is some of the players. It's been a great time and my wife is just excited about it as I am so I can see us playing regularly for a long time. I would love to have some more people in our group but it's so tough when you've got little kids that go to bed early, plus I don't like the idea of having random people in our home who we barely know just because they like to play D&D. Wish I had friends that were into it that lived close to us. In any case, two thumbs up for D&D 5th.

Tim, try getting to know people through boardgames first. If the boardgaming with them is fun, then invite them to play D&D. That's how I usually screen players before starting up a new campaign.

Thanks for the tip shellhead, sounds like an effective screening process. I've been lucky to have some friends interesting in role playing that have been good sports. Then we moved an hour away so we're kind of starting from square one again.

The new humble bundle is for Pathfinder PDFs. I got a TON of Pathfinder for just over $16.

Castles & Crusades bundle at the Bag of Holding. It's similar and mostly compatible with AD&D 1e and early 2e.

I'm still working on the general framework for a Basic Fantasy campaign. I want to have ways to work some of the better modules into the campaign, but I'm scaling things to work for a single adventurer because my wife wants to give it a trial run before we get a group together. I'm also a pretty inexperienced GM so it'll be good practice. So far the plan is to start things off at the Harvest Festival with games and whatnot for my lonely player to learn the mechanics, and then branch out into the big wide world from there. My big thing is I don't want to just plug-and-play a bunch of pregen content masquerading as something coherent; I always want the player(s) to be motivated to be doing what they're doing for a reason. Sandbox is my style, but I like having some coherent thing behind the scenes always nipping at heels, even if the player(s) haven't made the connections yet. Monster of the week sessions should be few and far between.

Harvest Festival link that I'm using to get the ball rolling.

With a single adventurer, I recommend using the rules tweaks in Scarlet Heroes Quickstart, which you can get for free here:
www.rpgnow.com/product/127458/Scarlet-Heroes-Quickstart

It changes a few things to make a single character be able to take on an old school adventure by him/herself. I've been using it along with Basic Fantasy for my daughter.

Are there any suggested adventures for Basic Fantasy or is it a 'use these rules with old school/other modules' sort of thing?

After we closed out our last sandbox Dungeon World campaign, I brought in a ton of stuff for my players to vote on for our next thing -- The One Ring, Blades in the Dark, Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, Stars Without Number, DCC, Spirit of '77 -- and they almost unanimously voted for Apocalypse World. So we just kicked that off. The first session felt kind of rough, probably because of some tired players and us all coming back to the table after a long hiatus, but I feel like I need to see what I can improve on my end of things before the next game.

Mr. White, have you seen this stuff ? A fair amount of high-quality free content for BF.

I have and have played DCC. Great game, but with its high lethality likely not something I'll play with the family.

I'm seriously thinking about basic fantasy, but also The One Ring because I like the sound of the focus on fellowship (and it's a gorgeous book) and also the Lone Wolf Adventure Game because it's designed for beginners and I like how they're all from the same organization. Seems like it'll help kick things off. Plus, this box is also gorgeous.

One thing though that's given me a little pause. I'm not unsure discussing plans and plots to kill and capture 'monsters' (likely looking to etch out their own survival ) is something I want to start developing with the kids. Maybe I've become milqtoast though and over thinking it...

Mr. White wrote: One thing though that's given me a little pause. I'm not unsure discussing plans and plots to kill and capture 'monsters' (likely looking to etch out their own survival ) is something I want to start developing with the kids. Maybe I've become milqtoast though and over thinking it...

I feel exactly the same way. When I play with my kids (son 6, daughter 9), I emphasize the goal of their adventure -- find the Black Pearl, save the captured prince, whatever -- and I hand out XP for solving problems. Dungeon World is great for this; at the end of each session you get 1 XP for following your alignment, and then everyone gets 1 XP for each of these things if at least one of them did it:

* defeat a memorable foe (note that "defeat" does not necessarily mean "kill")
* find a memorable treasure
* learn something new about the world

I also follow the DW and DCC directives to makes each monster feel unique, and describe them doing things to show that they have lives too. This gives my kids opportunities to interact with them in nonviolent ways. Sometimes monsters are just evil, though, and sometimes the kids just want to kill stuff. I don't want to enforce any particular behavior, so sometimes they just go murderhobo.

In any case, I find that tweaking XP awards in any given system is enough to encourage certain courses of action without limiting their choices.

Also, the last sentence in my previous post may not have communictaed my intention. I was linking to a bunch of downloadable Basic Fantasy adventures , in case you missed that.

What about the Mouse Guard rpg? Anybody played that with kids?

Jason Lutes wrote: I feel exactly the same way. When I play with my kids (son 6, daughter 9), I emphasize the goal of their adventure -- find the Black Pearl, save the captured prince, whatever -- and I hand out XP for solving problems. Dungeon World is great for this; at the end of each session you get 1 XP for following your alignment, and then everyone gets 1 XP for each of these things if at least one of them did it:

* defeat a memorable foe (note that "defeat" does not necessarily mean "kill")
* find a memorable treasure
* learn something new about the world

I also follow the DW and DCC directives to makes each monster feel unique, and describe them doing things to show that they have lives too. This gives my kids opportunities to interact with them in nonviolent ways. Sometimes monsters are just evil, though, and sometimes the kids just want to kill stuff. I don't want to enforce any particular behavior, so sometimes they just go murderhobo.

I like this, it's sort of like Star Trek in a fantasy setting. Establishing contact with different tribes, what are their goals, is it a misunderstanding, can you help them solve a problem, etc.

I've been posting in the board games thread, but it really should go here.

I've been running through the D&D 5e starter box with the girlfriend and her family: her parents and her 5-year-old son. She picked the halfling rogue first. We gave her son the close range fighter, grandma took the elf wizard (apparently she had played D&D back around 1980 as a magic user), and grandpa got the dwarf cleric by default. I think the box is a great value, and it was refreshing to be able to start slaying goblins within thirty minutes of opening the box to them for the first time. I read ahead of time of course, but I remember a bunch of campaigns growing up where we'd create characters one night and then never get around to actually playing. We've now spent more money on personal dice sets than the game itself once they found out that was a thing they could get. We've had I think 4 sessions and they just hit 4th level last Friday, and only have 2 more dungeons to explore, one of which is partially cleared out. When I told her that we probably only had at most 4 more sessions in the tank, we hit up the local game store and bought the three core rulebooks. I forgot how fun it is to read through them and think about the possibilities. She also got me the DM screen which has some funny stuff on the inside, like generating a random NPC name by rolling 3 d20s.

I also bought a jar with a ton of dice in it at Target for $10 as a gamble. It had 2-3 of all of the relevant dice* in it, plus a crap load more d6s and weird stuff like dice with playing card faces on them. There were also some d6s with face-filling colored circles on them instead. I could see them being used for game protos or something.

*Mine had
2 d20s (orange translucent)
2 d12s (red translucent)
2 d10s (cherry red)
0 percentile d10s come to think of it
2 d8s (white)
3 d6s (white, the roleplaying kind with numbers instead of pips) Plus at least 15 of various sizes and colors with pips.
3 d4s (white)

The colors varied by the jar you got, and it was clear so you could take a peak. One thing I noticed is that it seems like all of the dice of a given type in the jars would be the same color. So one box could have green d8s and blue d4s, for example.